Oops!

It looks like you don't have flash player 6 installed. Click here to go to Macromedia download page.

Endif

Before teaming up with Matt Fanale for the Caustic vs. EndIf EP, Meld Jason Hollis, a.k.a. Endif, had been plenty active in the electronic music scene in a variety of capacities. He is the founding artist of the Thirdwave Collective, a community of industrial musicians. Under the Thirdwave Collective name he has not only furthered his own projects, but also assisted other artists and promoted several concerts. Further infusing the scene, he has spent time behind the decks as DJ Cephalopod, once a regular in Reno, Nevada at such clubs as House of Sin. He has also produced a weekly two-hour show on the Live365 Web site and done countless unpaid remixes of other artist's songs while still somehow finding the time to bang out his own music as Endif.

On Meta, the first full length Endif album, one can hear the years of development and refinement that comes not just from talent but from time spent in the trenches. Along with the drive to cause a pandemic level infectious need for his music, Hollis's online writings reveal an individual who is ever politically conscious and culturally concerned. Given that, not to mention the fact that he volunteers for the SPCA and gives thanks to his pets in the liner notes of his CD, you might expect Endif to simply be another regurgitation of caring but unimaginative environmentally-aware industrial music. Rest assured, that is not so the case at all. With a bent toward the spectrum of IDM, Endif's sound is unique in its precise energy and searing sonic immersion, with little to no dogma spoon-fed to the choir.

Tell us about how you got started playing, creating, and recording music. When did you realize that music was the way for you?

Hollis: In addition to intensely feeling what I hear, I also analyze the hell out of it. 'How did they do that? What am I hearing?' Couple this with lots of fantastic music during my formative years and, well honestly, a lot of psychedelic inputs. Somewhere in that primordial soup, I started hearing songs in my head that I would later realize didn't exist, but should. So I set out to make that happen, started experimenting with literally whatever I could get my hands on. Eventually this started to sound good. When it started to snowball and become self-sustaining, I was hooked. I never stopped. Never will.

About your song writing process, what do you normally start with? Beats, melody, theme, samples?

Hollis: It is sort of a 'mulch/edit/assemble/refine' process. There's a constant recombinant experimental process stretching back 15 years that I both add to and draw from, like sort of a sonic gene pool. But usually any given coherent song starts with a single hunk of sound. I let that 'tell' me how it needs to be used. Rhythms usually come next, and once all that is working, I let that tell me where to go with the more tonal elements.

How did you meet Ben Arp, and how did signing with Crunch Pod come about? How is it working with this label?

Hollis: Like many of the people I work with, I met Ben online, only meeting him in person at the 2006 Reverence festival. Reverence is a wild time, band after band, so nothing was really discussed at the time, just social. Later, I decided I was ready to start shopping what eventually became Meta to labels, and after careful assessment of the many excellent labels out there, decided to try Crunch Pod first. Ben and I came to exactly the agreement I was hoping for, so I decided that I would skip further shopping and just run with it. So far so good. I'm happy with how things are proceeding. Crunch Pod has an excellent roster of bands, all of whom are very active and all of whom help each other. In a way, it's what Thirdwave should have been. Go figure.

Madison, Wisconsin—is there a thriving scene there?

Hollis: Absolutely. CTRLSHFT, Sensuous Enemy, that wang-job Caustic, the Gothsicles...this is truly fertile artistic ground.

Does it offer a good environment for a musician?

Hollis: Definitely. Everyone is very supportive of each other, lots of opportunity.

Tell us a little about how it was playing drums for Caustic and Terrorfakt in Chicago.

Hollis: That was good times, seeing Ben, Rachel, Eric, and David again. The Kinetic crew and Chicago itself treated us right, yet again. The DJ sets and performances were definitely top of the game, and the energy level for the whole event was just nuts.

Your music differs from a lot of your contemporaries, even those that you have remixed, in that you write melodies where most use melodic elements more as an additional percussive piece or a simple hook. Is that conscious or completely organic?

Hollis: I write what I write, whatever comes out, but there is conscious intent there. I have always been drawn to work that uses unorthodox methods to express what it must, and I guess this shows through in what I make. I approach music largely from the standpoint of sound design and experimentation. Nearly everyone uses melodic or tonal content as the primary vehicle to convey meaning and emotion and energy in their compositions, so perhaps there's a certain amount of reaction against that 'tyranny of the note,' as well. Mostly, though, I feel that the interesting parts in a piece are the points of contact and interaction between various elements and the spaces between them. Short answer? It's a gestalt thing.

Tell us a little about the Third Wave Collective

Hollis: Third Wave Collective started as a cluster of industrial musicians in Chicago that cooperated to get and play gigs, promote, etc. It sort of snowballed from there into a pan-North American thing via the Web site, still focused on cooperation, street teaming, etc. Then I stopped putting so much energy into it, so now it languishes. The site is still up, people still cooperate, but the organization has become sort of vestigial. Perhaps it will be reawakened soon, perhaps not. The site remains up, though, and almost all of it is publicly accessible, so feel free to dig.

What is your favorite remix you have done and why?

Hollis: Right now, this would definitely be the remix of Replogen's 'Last Tribe.' It sounds nothing like the original, but contains at least 50 percent of the original sounds. The original is a crushing breakbeat-ish power noise piece that you can hear on Replogen's MySpace page. The remix is a power noise psy-trance hybrid: trance structures, noise sound template. This is one of the many directions I've been going lately with Endif. I'm planning on submitting it to a compilation soon.

Have you ever remixed someone else's song just for kicks that you have not made public? Tell us a little about it.

Hollis: All the time. I think I may have more remixes than originals at this point. No one's heard my Das Ich remix of 'Gottes Tod,' but I slacked until the remix contest was over to even start it. Several others were born of similar situations that were not selected, so languished. A goodly number have been released to Web or compilations or have made it onto albums, though, so I keep doing it (as if I could really stop).

Who are your current favorite bands, and why?

Hollis: I'm really in love with the stuff coming out on Sistinas, such as Cacophony and W.A.S.T.E., AntZen, Hands, MECHaNISMz, and Crunch Pod; pick anything from those, you can't go wrong. Also Annodalleb, Babyland, Puppy of course, Autechre, Daniel Myer, Richard James...so much good stuff out there!

Do you have a take on SLSK Records and Soulseek?

Hollis: I've done my fair share of file-sharing in the past, and it's a valid means of previewing the increasingly crowded constellation of music out there, much of which may not be to one's taste, or may just simply suck. But when one simply downloads the album of an artist they like, and then never supports that artist by purchasing any of their material, they are in fact fucking that artist over, and therefore suck. Preview, kids, but buy the bloody album.

What role does music in general and more specifically yours have in politics?

Hollis: The two are inseparable, being subsets of an individual's context. Endless interlocking cycles.

Tell us a little about want it is you hope people get out of your music.

Hollis: Enjoyment. New context. Altered perception. A craving for more.